Breast cancer and hyped-up claims

On Saturday evening, I was watching the national broadcasting network of Canada (the CBC), and happened to catch a re-run of a “Marketplace” consumer advocacy program. The program was about the truth and science behind a North American health phenomenon: Goji juice. The Goji berry hails from Tibet and is touted to have amazing healthful benefits. In fact, Earl Mindell of “Vitamin Bible” fame has made claims that Goji juice can cure up to 75 percent of breast cancers and refers to a study done by Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute. The TV program proved that this was false because Sloan-Kettering has not done any studies on this berry, the National Cancer Institute has stated that no natural product has ever been shown to cure cancer, only prevent risk, and finally they had scientific studies done that showed there is no scientific evidence to show that the Goji berry has any cancer prevention properties.

Why is this so significant? Because Earl Mindell’s organization gets $50 U.S. a bottle and mostly from sick peole looking for hope and a cure. It claims many other health benefits too, so he is not discriminating against taking money from other people with life-threatening conditions. The FDA has placed distributors of Goji juice on notice for unfounded marketing claims and in addition has stated that the products are unsafe for the referenced conditions. Pretty tough stuff. That is why I am more of a supporter of the FDA than not. Someone has to police the traveling medicine shows. I have no personal experience with Goji juice but was really attentive when I realized that there may be many breast cancer patients spending a lot of money on the hyped-up Goji . The program also interviewed a young man who had spent thousands of dollars on bottles of Goji juice for his father with cancer. He had been purchasing it from his landlady who he felt had also been mislead. There are distributors in Canada that have personally made $170,000 in a year from the sales strategy of this product. The Canadian investigative team did an amazing job of holding Earl Mindell and his organization accountable; the program ended with him promising to take some claims off of his Web site, and he gave the young man interviewed his money back.

Still, we need to be vigilant about our own wellness and care. It is so easy to slip into false security in taking a super-hyped but ineffective product, worse still if it’s $50 dollars a bottle.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathy-Ellen Kups, RN

Kathy-Ellen is a Registered Nurse living in Michigan. In 2003, Kathy-Ellen was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. She was cancer-free from April 2004 until December of 2013 when it was discovered that...read more